Board 12s

Paul Gipson of the The Beer Card bridge blog referred to the recent excellent set of posts by Stacy and Linda here:

http://thebeercard.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-are-you-reading-today.html

I hope both are still okay. After the justsaying blog mentioned moi (here: http://pokerandbridge.blogspot.com/2009/01/he-wears-skirt-to-play-bridge-say-what.html ), including a picture, I was unable to get to the computer I blog on, as my head would no longer fit through doorframes, and I was constrained to use our laptop in the kitchen, where I normally play bridge, watch the big TV, and surf.

Fortunately Sarah Palin came out against bloggers yesterday, and I quickly got a pygmy sized head, and can now finally blog once more.

This week I was playing bridge with Karen and watched her finish up our tourney on board 12 of a speedball pairs. I had been making a mess in the kitchen, I mean making spaghetti, while watching Senators hockey in HD, and discussing Senators fixes on the net.

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I negative doubled since my hand was very negative. Well not actually - I doubled since if I passed that was just going to spur the opponents to bid, and if I bid 2S that was going to encourage both them and Karen, so I doubled to add some friction to the auction – make it harder for the opponents to know whose hand it was. In addition the double vastly improved the odds I would not be defending or playing the contract, which meant more time for spaghetti and hockey: the necessities of life.

With our spades at least 5-3, I knew much of the contracts that we reached would either play for at least down two, or the opponents would have game their way.

One of the possible bad outcomes occurred when it turned out Karen had a big balanced hand (we don't open our 14-17 1NT with 17 and five card suit) and bid 3NT. With no ruffing shortness and a soft value in diamonds I left her there and went to stir the spaghetti sauce, which would be less messy than this contract.

Karen is used to my dummies so didn't get stalled by the sight of the junk. There is no use allowing your focus to slip into disillusionment when the honeymoon period of the auction is over.

Karen let the diamond lead go to the jack and her king, played a spade to the jack, and a club to the king, won by overcaller's ace. Now this partly disguised the club situation, but the successful spade play to dummy should have been enough of a clue for the opponents to switch to hearts. Another option was for Karen to lead the club queen at trick two, since the overcaller was most likely to have the club ace.

The overcaller continued with ace and another diamond, Karen discarding a heart. Now Karen had a finesse of the club jack for nine tricks if it worked, down a whole bunch if it failed. So instead Karen ran spades, and discarded clubs from dummy. Both opponents worked hard to hold on their hearts, and now the club jack dropped and Karen had got us a 97.5% score.

A day later, when the spaghetti mess was almost cleaned up, I had to finished board 12 while the Senators played again on TV. I opened a 14-17 1NT and got stuck there:

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The opponents took five hearts on the go, and I pitched spades from dummy, and a spade and dimaond from hand. Now LHO switched to a club: jack, queen, ace. I played the diamond queen, covered twice. Now I ran clubs getting to this position:


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Now this speedball so counting is not a priority. On the two remaining clubs I discarded the spade jack, and king. Both opponents hung onto their diamonds and the spade nine took the last trick. I was happy since the Senators won both games - Karen less so since she hopes we get a good draft pick for next season.